There's no place for the Gordon Ramsay approach.
Do you think of your company as a safe place to work? Not in terms of physical hazards - rather, are your staff protected from bullying behaviour from colleagues and are there systems ready if an incident occurs?
Most businesses are well set up to deal with sexual harassment in
the workplace. The high-profile resignation of David Jones chief executive Mark McInnes last year showed what can happen when accusations start flying. These days people are more litigious, as the aggressive case against McInnes showed. His accuser eventually settled out of court for A$850,000.
Workplace bullying, say the Australian authors of a new book, Preventing Workplace Bullying*, should be taken equally seriously. Dr Carlo Caponecchia and Dr Anne Wyatt argue that while many see bullying as a conduct or personality issue resolved by intervention at the individual level, bullying is a systemic issue that requires a sustained systemic response because a range of individual, organisational and environmental factors contribute to it.
Bullies tend to thrive in companies where competition is strong, says Caponecchia. It happens in situations where people are competing for resources, positions, promotions and esteem: where people are trying to do more with less.
It is also a matter of culture. Caponecchia says he can walk into a company and recognise quite quickly whether the company culture harbours bullies or staff are happy and work together well.
Management can be loath to attack bullying head on if it is being done by a valuable staff member. It often happens that the perpetrator has status, possibly management status, and is seen as too valuable to discipline.
This is bad management, says Caponecchia. He asks: Where is the mentoring, the succession planning? No one person should have that much power, he says.
"Organisations have a duty to all their staff to provide a safe work environment."
It is up to management to say: "We don't bully, we don't harass, we don't discriminate," says the lecturer at the University of New South Wales, an expert in psychological hazards at work.
"It's about a values statement but it also has to be backed up with some action - this is what we do - because it is part of a whole system."
For managers, it's about planning and implementing a risk management approach. And the risk management policy should be tailored to include psychological hazards such as bullying. Companies need to teach people about bullying - about the difference between bullying, harassment, violence and discrimination. Then there has to be a suite of control mechanisms which kick in, says Caponecchia.
According to the authors' research, the Gordon Ramsay management style is alive and well. The approach, says Caponecchia, is: "This happened to me so now it's going to happen to you - it didn't hurt me that much. You earn your stripes." It happens in the hospitality industry but it is also going on in law firms, he says.
"It just takes someone high up to say, 'No, we are not doing that' for it to stop."
And the business will reap the benefits through improved productivity, reduced staff turnover and less staff time spent complaining at the water cooler, says Caponecchia.
If management is not handling the situation professionally and proactively, people will leave. And in many cases they won't make a complaint before they leave: it's just too hard and uncomfortable.
The authors say a 2007 survey, by the Australian website CareerOne, revealed that 74 per cent of respondents had been bullied at one time and 22 per cent had quit their jobs in response. According to another survey, 40 per cent fear negative consequences if they say anything.
Bullying can be as simple as rostering a mother to work at hours that are unfriendly for her family. They might be told off if they complain about the arrangement.
"It puts the problem back on to the individual. 'It's your problem, it's not systemic'," says Caponecchia.
While it is assumed that people being bullied are weak or a bit different, there is evidence to show that people who are very confident and hard working are also targeted. Bullying of bosses is also more common than people think.
"Often we assume that it happens from a superior but upwards bullying does happen,"
It might be a middle manager who circumvents the chain of command by going to a higher manager with information to undermine the manager under attack, says Caponecchia.
The authors define bullying behaviour as something typically done "repeatedly" but it does not have to be the same behaviour. It might be a show of public criticism one day, then a malicious rumour the next.
While many companies have risk management systems within HR policy, these need to be checked and audited, says Caponecchia. And it is not always ideal to have HR so involved in sorting out workplace bullying.
"HR is not necessarily free from conflict. They are there to represent employees but are there for the employer too."
Caponecchia recently suggested to a government organisation that grievance training procedures could be introduced at the staff induction. But that would imply that staff were going to need such procedures, the organisation protested. Given the statistics, there's a reasonable chance they would, argued Caponecchia.
The damage done
The many costs of bullying
* Overhead costs while production is reduced
* Time lost due to preoccupation with the negative situation
* Production lost due to absenteeism - and presenteeism (when workers are at work but performing below par)
* Time lost due to internal transfer
* Time lost when people look for a new job in work time
* Time lost when people prepare their case
* Loss of skill and experience when a person leaves
* Loss of institutional knowledge when a person leaves
* Lowered production rates of replacement workers
* Preventing Workplace Bullying: An evidence-based guide for managers and employees by Carlo Caponecchia and Anne Wyatt (Allen & Unwin, A$35)
Gill South is an Auckland freelance writer
